Things to do in London this weekend (30-31 May)

London’s biggest pop festival returns, and this is going to be a biggie. Like every year, next summer Mighty Hoopla is presenting all of London’s gays and theys with a mighty line-up of nostalgic pop acts, disco-leaning dance music and megastars. The 2026 edition will be headlined by the one and only Lily Allen, who will be performing her searing and brutal new album West End Girl on Saturday, May 30. Allen will be joined by Jessie J, JLS, Horse Meat Disco and Agnes. On Sunday, the Scissor Sisters will bring their legendary show to the Brockwell Park stage. They’re joined on the billing by Perrie, Five, Alexandra Burke and Cascada. 

You can’t move for excellent pizza in London right now, and yet, Bar Etna in Newington Green is utterly correct in assuming there’s still room for more. The Plimsoll and Tollington’s Ed McIlroy is coming for London slice supremacy and working with Joe Beddia of Philadelphia’s Pizzeria Beddia. Bar Etna is an immediate vibe. It’s a sleek 1960s Sicilian vino den which raises your cool factor by 10 points as soon as you step inside. The menu is beautifully simplistic. There is ‘cheese’, ‘salad’, ‘cured meat’ and ‘focaccia’ alongside four pizzas, each sizeable enough to share between two. All the pizzas are customisable with taut and torched bases – all exactingly crisp.

Two-time RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Jinkx Monsoon has touched down in London to play icon of the silver screen, Judy Garland. If you’re a fan, you’ve probably seen Monsoon impersonate Garland before, but this is a different thing entirely, because End of the Rainbow is a proper two-act play (by Peter Quilter). There’s zero audience interaction, but a handful of songs breaking up what is in fact the pretty depressing story of Garland’s demise. Quilter’s play is set months before Garland’s early death in 1969 from an accidental drug overdose. Monsoon earns her stripes as Judy. Impish and sassy, but with a slow drawl, she reels off stories from her past with glee. In Jinkx Monsoon, another star rises.

Twenty-two-year-old Owen (Spike Fearn from Alien: Romulus) is a hopeless romantic who works as a sound engineer in the student union at Manchester City University. One night he meets the enigmatic Emily, dressed as a fairy, and sparks fly. But when goes to text her the next day, he’s got the wrong number. Owen then embarks on a maniacal, and often cringeworthy, quest to find his real-life manic pixie dream girl. On the way he gains the help of another Emily (The Nice Guys’ Angourie Rice), a determined psychology student writing her dissertation on romantic love. She’s looking for a case study to prove her thesis that love is an unnecessary ‘evolutionary hangover’ that can only lead to self-sabotage and madness. It’s a romcom match made in heaven, and this has all the things a good romcom should: deceit and miscommunication; a pair of plucky will-they won’t-they leads with fantastic chemistry; a grand gesture; a rousing speech; some cracking one-liners, and a great soundtrack.

Understand the history of HIV and the major global health challenge it still poses in the world today through stories of protest and care, photography, film and archival material in this new Wellcome Collection display. Across two rooms, Tenderness & Rage will explore the UK’s 1980-90s AIDS epidemic, contemporary experiences of HIV in the Global South and reveal how activist groups and volunteer-led organisations have supported and campaigned for those living with HIV. It will also spotlight the much-overlooked experience of women living with HIV in the UK and globally.

Care is acclaimed writer-director Alexander Zeldin getting back to his roots. His newest is a naturalistic yarn about an English retirement home. While contemporary stresses on the British care system are alluded to, they’re not really the point here; instead, it’s a more universal care home experience. It centres on Linda Bassett’s Joan, a grandmother who has been placed in the show’s unnamed home for what – as she sees it – is a couple of weeks to recuperate from a nasty fall. It’s an extraordinary performance from Bassett who gives an utterly unflinching performance as a kindly grandmother being slowly hollowed out over the course of the play’s nebulous time frame. It’s shamelessly emotionally manipulative in places, but it’s a world that little dramatic light gets thrown on – and with the brilliant Bassett as our proxy, it’s a powerfully unsparing guide to the end.

After a year out, Dialled In is returning to the capital city for its fifth birthday celebrations. Once again, the all-dayer will bring established and emerging artists from all over diasporic and South Asian countries and cities to east London. Unlike past editions, this year’s event will take over multiple venues throughout Dalson, from Café OTO to The Divine to Rio Cinema. It’ll see former member of The xx, Baria, make her first return to the London festival circuit in fifteen years, a rare London live set from rising star Gayathri Krishnan and the London debut of Lifafa, frontman of Peter Cat Recording Co. That’s alongside appearances from the likes of Sarathy Korwar, Mya Mehm, Anish Kumar and Raf Reza. This year will also see the festival expand into the realms of food, film, dance and comedy. 

Peter Shaffer’s landmark 1973 play Equus has dated in some ways, but it’s still a seethingly sexual, deeply unsettling interrogation of the Apollonian versus the Dionysian that centres on Alan Strang, a young man who – as the play begins – has just brutally blinded six horses. But why? And what’s to be done? Inspired by a real life incident (that involved the blinding of 26 horses), if the author was any less earnest in the way he ploughs into Alan’s unimaginably disturbing actions and psychology, it wouldn’t work. Here, though, old-school director Lindsay Postner plays a blinder by using the Menier’s core strength of intimacy. It’s this intimacy of Posner’s production that magnifies Shaffer’s meaning. 

Piano tuner Nikki White (Leo Woodall) has exceptionally sensitive hearing, which has stymied his hopes of a career as a professional musician but comes in really handy for some off-the-books safecracking work. But can he maintain the criminal side hustle in the long term or will conscience, or circumstances, bring him down? Director and co-writer Daniel Roher takes his sweet time in figuring it out. Tuner has a real sense of romance, as Nikki makes their rounds of luxury homes and concert halls in New York and its suburbs through warmly coloured, crisply cut montages. It’s pleasantly in-tune entertainment.

Michelle Terry, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, takes on one of theatre’s great female roles in Anna Jordan’s translation of Bertolt Brecht’s coruscating condemnation of the soul-destroying endlessness of warfare, directed by Globe associate artist Elle While. Brecht wrote Mother Courage in 1939, as fascism overtook Europe, but deliberately set it several hundred years earlier, during the Thirty Years War – intending the distance to provide a kind of allegorical universality. Jordan’s version goes further, never naming the conflict, only identifying sides by differing colours. It’s a full-blooded production that keeps a warped sense of vibrancy going until almost the end, before deftly introducing a fleeting moment of vulnerability. It feels powerfully necessary.     

Could the West End transfer of Ava Pickett’s 1536 really live up to all the hype? The answer, thankfully, is: yes, and then some. Co-produced with Margot Robbie’s production company, director Lyndsey Turner has crafted a heady, sensory experience, one that is jolted forward by faultless performances from the female leads. The 110-minute one-act run time might raise eyebrows, yet the show never loses pace, and refuses to overcook things either. 1536 is a once-in-a-blue-moon theatrical experience. I laughed. I cried. I probably could have screamed too. Pickett’s play is a tour de force, and 1536 one of those theatrical moments that stays with you for a very long time.

If you’ll always carry a torch for your teenage celeb crush, then this one’s for you. From the internet’s impact on beauty trends to all things cute and cuddly, Somerset House has a history of delving into contemporary pop cultural trends with its exhibition programming, and it continues in a similar vein with its spring 2026 exhibition. In Holy Pop! Somerset House will explore the power of fandom and the world of modern shrines. Through art, memorabilia, letters, photographs, and interactive installations, the pay what you can exhibition will uncover the rituals of idolisation, showing how fandom shapes identity, values, and community. 

The first major European exhibition of James McNeil Whistler’s work in 30 years arrives at Tate Britain in 2026. Known as a truly global artist, The Victorian oil painter re-wrote many of the rules of art, and was an early adopter of ’art for art’s sake’. The retrospective brings together the artist’s world-famous paintings such as ‘Whistler’s Mother’ (Mr Bean fans will recognise this one, IYKYK) alongside rarely, or never seen, works. It includes exquisite portraits, drawings, prints, and designs, from as early as his teens in St Petersburg to the enigmatic late self-portraits. 

Krapp’s Last Tape is one of those formally groundbreaking, emotionally devastating Samuel Beckett plays that is nonetheless so locked into being staged the same way every time – thanks to notoriously rigid Beckett estate – that it can be tricky to comment on a new production. Even if it is one that’s directed by, stars and is designed by Gary Oldman. He is, to be clear, bloody good. Oldman’s Krapp is eccentric but not as clownish a figure as sometimes depicted: the famous business with (spoiler alert) his consumption of two bananas at the start is funny but also restrained and pitiful, an elderly man munching a snack contemplatively, savouring it because it seems he has so little else going on. It’s a play about aging and regret. It’s a bold and profoundly unnerving final stroke and if you’re lucky enough to have to bagged a ticket to this largely sold out run – you can still get standing and Monday tickets – Oldman’s haunting return is excellent. 

London Rivers Week has been committed to celebrating and restoring London’s rivers for 10 years now. In that decade, the need to appreciate our city’s waterways has only grown. The theme of the charity event this year is ‘Know Your Local River’, encouraging Londoners to connect with and take pride in the river nearest to them. To help you dp that, there’ll be guided walks, exhibitions, volunteer sessions, lectures, workshops, clean-ups and talks going on in every corner of the capital. 

The Natural History Museum’s temporary 2026 exhibition offers a sop to the dinosaur-loving masses without technically being about dinosaurs, focussing instead on the weird, wonderful and terrifying world of prehistoric sea monsters. Think pliosaurs, think ichthyosaurs, think think mosasaurs – whose profile shot right up after being featured as the ultimate reptillian killer in Jurassic World. We’re not quite clear what this show will involve specifically at this stage, but the NHM’s temporary exhibitions are always a delight, far more spacious and with far more technologically advanced interactive exhibits than its delightful but creaky dinosaur room. 

This hugely enjoyable new Sherlock Holmes adventure from playwright Joel Horwood gives you all you could possibly want from The Great Detective: the catchphrases, the wild connect-the-dots genius, the Victoriana, the post-Cumberbatch notion that the guy is a bit of an autistic weirdo but cranked up to 10 and given a flamboyant drug habit. It’s also directed marvellously by Sean Holmes, who turns in a meaty, satisfying romp that has plenty of enjoyably weird grit in its wheels. For the most part, the writing is sharp, the leads are superb, and Holmes’ direction gives the whole thing an engaging extra layer of weirdness. It’s a rare play of which I can confidently say that I’d love to see a sequel.

After 430 or so years, it’s fairly apparent that we as a species are not going to get tired of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. And Emily Lim’s new take still feels like a breath of fresh air. Lim’s USP is creating massive-scale participatory public theatre works. This isn’t quite that, but it uses the Globe’s large, lairy crowd to maximum impact for a production that cheerily deviates repeatedly from Shakespeare’s exact text in a joyous, almost non-stop welter of audience interaction. The embellishments run from start to finish, with a lengthy and enjoyable pre-show that involves roping audience members into ‘auditions’ for the Mechanicals. It’s a good vibes only Dream. By the time it all ends in a virtual apocalypse of bubbles it’s safe to say that you will have been charmed.

After four decades of underuse, the Barbican has decided its time to resurrect its grand sculpture court which sits above the Concert Hall and is framed by the curve of Frobisher Crescent. To kick things off, the court will host a major public artwork by Colombian sculptor Delcy Morelos. Inspired by ancestral Andean cosmovisions, and drawing on minimalism and abstraction, Morelos’ installations are hand built from clay, soil, hay and plant seed. By embedding the loam with spices, including cinnamon and cloves, Morelos transforms her sculptures into multi-sensory environments.  

The Southbank’s graffitied skate mecca is about as iconic as skate parks get. This spring, the Southbank Centre is celebrating 50 years of the concrete space beneath the Queen Elizabeth Hall that was first adopted by skaters in 1976. To tell the story of the legendary park, the Southbank centre has collaborated with the skate community to identify key events, figures and moments that have shaped the space, bringing all the stories together in one mega exhibition. Skate 50 will comprise photographs, films, sound art and animations, featuring contributions from Winstan Whitter, Dan Magee, Lev Tanju, Jack Brooks, the Keep Rolling Project, Beatrice Dillon and Sofia Negri. 

Virginia Woolf’s towering 1931 novel The Waves, a haunting modernist blend of poetry and novel that sketches out the lives of six – or perhaps seven – friends, is not a simple read. But it goes down surprisingly smoothly in this stage adaptation by Flora Wilson Brown. Julia Levai’s deft, efficient production and a superb cast inject warmth and feeling into Woolf’s lengthy poetic soliloquies. We get plenty of Woolf’s original poetry, but Brown is fearless about chopping and changing, adding lashings of dialogue and rearranging things to make the autobiographical character of Rhoda the effective main narrator. It’s a clever move, and it flows smoothly, poignantly mapping out six people’s lives from childhood innocence to middle age.

Dave Harris’ Tender is a drama about how hard it is to be a man. But don’t worry, you can put the pepper spray away: we are far away from incel territory here. The US playwright’s latest, directed by Matthew Xia, speaks to the sheer scope of Harris’ imagination, and Xia’s ability to articulate his out-there ideas on a modest budget. The setting is a New Jersey strip club in which the female clientele and the male strippers are allowed to engage in actual sex acts due to a convoluted legal loophole. But the men are a mess. It’s a story about the pressure of being a man as a sexual being; not in a woe-is-me way but as in ‘these are pressures on men that aren’t often discussed’.

Playwright David Hare collaborates again with Ralph Fiennes in this big portrait ofDame Ellen Terry and Sir Henry Irving, two of the most important actors who ever lived, which also serves as a history of and an endearing paean to theatre. Grace Pervades is the story of their time on stage, a winking exploration of traditionalism and populism in theatre. There are clipped vowels and lavish costumes – Fiennes looks great in tights and a brocade cape – and it all looks rather lovely. It’s all good fun, a cheeky, self-referential and sometimes self-critical play. It’s an entertaining night both at the theatre and of the theatre.

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined beyond belief, through cutting-edge technology. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score. Enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more for just £23.60!

Save 20% on tickets, only through Time Out Offers 

This 1968 play by the great dramatist of the fractured American Dream, Arthur Miller, is compelling in its uncompromising cynicism, originally written as a rebuke to how Miller perceived the abstract, consequence-free tone of 1960s theatre. New York cop Victor (Elliot Cowan) has returned with his wife, Esther (Faye Castelow), to his long-dead father’s home before it’s demolished, re-opening old wounds. A heavyweight creative team makes the weight of this past almost tangible and it’s thrilling to see talented actors really knock chunks out of each other, with the director excavating every ounce of pain from their performances. There’s some seriously meaty material here about how we take ownership of our lives when value is relative.

Artist Sian Fan’s new multidisciplinary installation at Somerset House explores how magic and mysticism manifests in our consumer-driven world. From TikTok tarot readings, to Pokémon cards, Chinese fortune knots and video game talismans, Fan’s references range from pop culture to the historical. She draws on the myths, folklore, and storytelling traditions found in contemporary gaming and popular culture, Fan highlights how spirituality persists in these ultra-modern spaces. 

Broadwick Soho arrived with serious flair in 2023 and has been serving up a hit of West End glamour, that feels both indulgent and effortlessly cool ever since. Tucked inside the hotel, Dear Jackie is its seductive Italian dining room, all Murano glow, red silk walls and plush booths that could tell a few stories. The menu leans into refined Italian comfort with superior pasta and reimagined classics, making it an ideal spot to settle in for dinner.

With this exclusive Time Out offer, you can sink into Soho’s newest slice of dolce vita decadence for less with a three courses set meun and a glass of Champagne (worth £22). The perfect pre-theatre treat or the start of a night that might run on far longer than planned.

Get 33% off with vouchers, only through Time Out Offers

Saltburn and Gone Girl star Rosamund Pike plays Jess Parks, a pioneering feminist judge, in Suzie Miller's three-hand play that feels more like a 100-minute monologue. Like its companion legal drama Prima Facie, which was a massive hit starring Jodie Comer, Inter Alia is a spectacularly demanding showcase for a female star, and Pike delivers the goods with stadium-level charisma, intelligence and flair. Miller’s play is based on interviews with female judges who juggle demanding careers with caring responsibilities and social lives: ‘inter alia’ means ‘among other things’. Punchy, thought-provoking drama, it has brought Jess and real women like her into the limelight.

A landmark exhibition exploring how Black British music has shaped culture in Britain and beyond. Items on display will include Joan Armatrading’s childhood guitar, looks worn by Little Simz and newly acquired photography by Dennis Morris and Jennie Baptiste. The exhibition’s opening will also feature a sound experience by Sennheiser, and will mark the launch of a the inaugural edition of a new festival that will take place annually each spring, bringing together the East Bank’s neighbouring cultural institutions, which include the London College of Fashion, the BBC Music Studios, Sadler’s Wells East and UCL East.

Joo Young Won used to be head chef at the Michelin-starred Galvin at Windows, his new restaurant, Calong, is cosy and simple, with food made for sharing. Chef Joo was raised in South Korea, but began his cookery career in the UK, and for a long time focused on French technique. It shows. Calong sees him cooking dishes inspired by his native cuisine in a masterful light-touch fusion fashion. A warm pumpkin and crisp pear salad is delicately dressed with gochujang, cured Chalkstream trout with perfectly tart sesame and plum soy, the fried chicken is crunchy yet silky, and a BBQ onglet is sweet and tender with a bulgogi jus. It’s one of the most exciting restaurants Stoke Newington has to offer.